


St. Martin in the Fields

by bmouse



Category: Redwall Series - Brian Jacques
Genre: Amnesia, Everyone Gets A Bit of A Cameo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 20:59:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1442641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life goes on after the events of “Mossflower” and “Legend of Luke."  aka. The chronicles of St. Martin the temporally displaced.</p>
            </blockquote>





	St. Martin in the Fields

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly edited and cross posted from tumblr.

Spring and it’s time to put up the sword up in the weathervane. He can feel it with a rising urgency that has him taking extra shifts with the tower-building crews. Spring, tower, sword: the ordering is very clear. Clarity is something to be grateful for, when he can have it.

A troupe of southern travelling squirrels had knocked on their gates looking for a place to winter and he remembers all the songs they had sung for their supper last night, the way they had cartwheeled and twirled in the firelight and none of their names. Something in his heart had stirred to see them and he had clapped as hard as the Abbeybabes, as hard as the deep-woods folk who had never seen so much as a wandering minstrel. Memory is over-kind to him since the battle for Mossflower. He can sense that it hides too much behind the veil but he lets it be. Whatever questions he had are answered: his father’s fate is known and chronicled in his own painstakingly neat hand on rainy days in his room above the gatehouse. For everything else, he doesn’t even have the right questions. It is enough to know that he must have had good memories of painted wagons and costumes and rhymes and that the profusion of roses blooming by the back gate leaves him shaken.

Now is the best time. The rains have passed and at least for a while he won’t have to think about the poor thing being alone and drenched up there. _Must I?_ he thinks sometimes - probing at this new destiny that has taken root inside him like a child worrying a loose tooth. _Must I really set it down?_ For so much of his life it had been the only thing in the world that mattered. But now there is the Abbey and the ‘one-thing’ from his first life will dwell inside the ‘one thing’ from his second. The three of them: Martin, the Abbey, the sword will never be too far apart. That is the bargain: it will always be _his_ but he has to let it go willingly, and in return it will readily come to any creature who needs it.

Gnoff doesn’t blink an eye when he tells him the plan, they’re all used to him by now. The gate has to be just so, the west wall built painstakingly over a catacomb from the ruins of Kotir (he had argued, and insisted, and in the end moved the survey markers overnight. Gnoff is a bad influence), and he refused to let Foremole even out a step in a staircase because the difference in height will make a groove and one day Cluny the Scourge will trip over it and then hop down the hallway swearing a blue streak. Martin smirks a little whenever it’s his turn to sweep those stairs. He’s a Warrior, not a saint.

Gnoff wouldn’t be Gnoff though if he let a thing go by unremarked.

"I’ve got to be askin’ ‘Why?’ though… Couldn’t we always use another sharp thingummy around here? "

"Not if we do our job right. We’ve got patrols, sentries, allies - no more pitched battles in our lifetime. Besides, the symbol’s more important than the thing itself you know. ‘The sword that freed the land’ - it should be known, seen, and seldom used."

"Martin,” he starts gently “I hate to break it to you but you’re our symbol, mate - not a bit of star-rock."

He steps back and draws it in a flash, he can manage that much. It flows in his paws, following the steps they worked on together, the ones that had so impressed the warrior hogs of the North ( so many seasons ago ) and pulled delighted squeals out of four sets of woodland orphans now - come and gone from the Dormitory. And then, in the golden, late light of the day his eyes suddenly see a distant land, a sea shore, a valley and the sword moves into something else, some other form long-taught. His muscles bunch, ready to make that next leap - parry to thrust to follow-through and suddenly there’s nothing there.

The sword sinks point-first into the earth and he is kneeling by it, out of breath as if bowing down to apologize to the fragrant, freshly-split grass. His friend kneels down beside him.

"Gnoff, I’m getting old." _The sword will last longer than me._

Gnoff puts a comforting paw on his shoulder. With their heads bowed together it’s plain to see that the number of white hairs on the quick thief’s paw and the sturdy fighter’s shoulder are exactly the same. Their eyes meet and crinkle at the corners. As one they fall back against the grass, wheezing with laugher. The sword lists to the side in the April breeze and, unwilling to be left out of the fun, also gently falls over.

"I can still manage the pie-knife, the trowel and the wheelbarrow” Martin says ruefully, pulling Gnoff up by the paw and brushing scraps of clover off the former thief’s tunic with his tail because while age had given him a wider repertoire and sweetened his singing voice it had quite given up on granting gravitas and dignity. “- the mighty icon of Mossflower courage might fare a little better if no-one sees me dropping it on my foot.”

“Allright then. Well matey, don’t you fret!” Gnoff links their elbows together. He’s head and shoulders shorter and Martin stoops obligingly, the way he’s done for every season since they met. “Pie-knife you said? I’ve got just the job for you - the darlin’ wife’s been putting the strawberry crop to good use, let’s go conquer the kitchen, liberate some flower and make jam-scones! Eh? Eh?!”

While Gnoff is too busy composing an ode to Columbine’s jam-making skills Martin burns a batch, but even then they’re sweet.

\- - -

Gnoff won’t let him brood. Ben Sickle challenges him to a cider-making competition so he’s in the comforting dim with the cellarhogs, surrounded by a bouquet of woodbarrels and fruity, gently aging cordials on days when his head wound plays up and standing out in the sun is like trying to dodge a rain of daggers. Whenever he goes out he meets interesting new folk, the old Skipper of otters, who patiently shows him how to make that hotroot soup he’s always liked. Dinny, the Foremole of Moledeep, a very sensible fellow.

Even a wildcat of all things - an old bee-keeper named Gingivere who lives in a hollow tree by a creek and had sworn to eat no living thing but fish. Ferdy and Cogs are great friends with the goodbeast and say they have been since they were small. How Goody Sickle ever approved _that_ must be quite a story. Martin looks up at him, at those large-sinewed paws tipped with pale claws each as long Martin’s whiskers ( though worn smooth with scratching so as not to scare off customers) and he finds himself breathing a bit faster, bracing his feet into the earth. The cat’s eyes reassure him though, something about those sad clear green eyes is familiar.

“Forgive me, I’m sure we’ve met before.” he’s brave enough to say it when he knows it needs saying. Gingivere lays his enormous orange head down on his paws so he can look Martin in the eye.

“Yes, that is true. But please do not trouble yourself, sir Martin. We shared a dungeon once, these are much better circumstances.”

At the end of the day Martin takes some honey back to the Abbey, promising to set up something with the kitchens for a long-term trade. A pair of minnows are in a sack dangling over his shoulder. They had talked as they fished, and in the cold evening as Martin had daringly let his new friend’s large body shield him from the breeze he wondered if another mouse had ever been that close to a wildcat.

\- - -

The gatehouse room is large, though the corners are crowded with bits and bobs of mended armor, and leather tack: Martin’s own version of Bella’s knitting. Rows of seedlings wrapped and brought in from the cold move in come winter, so the big-enough-for-a-Badger-Lord bed finds itself underneath its’ own fledgeling Mossflower wood. When an unlucky young pine falls and makes a pincushion out of St. Ninian’s roof everyone fits. Posy and the Gnofflet curl up front by the window and the adults burrow in among the pillows. Even Martin, big-un that he is drowns in a river of soft colorful wool (Bella’s old quilt) and insists that there’s plenty more left to stuff into his and Columbine’s ears, or Gnoff’s gob if he doesn’t stop with the snoring  
.  
\- - -

Good thing too, because it is an unkind winter. Construction stalls on the library and the upper residentials. Ropes are pulled from the Great Hall to the gates so nobeast gets lost in the blizzards. More than half the Abbey winds up sleeping on the floor of the Hall, the feast table draped with blankets to make a cosy sleeping-fort where body heat keeps each other warm.

The Infirmary is crowded as well. Martin’s northern stock leaves him immune to most ailments and he does his part but when Gnoff is brought in, coughing forcefully until the fat mouse rolls back and forth over his own tail, nothing can keep him out.

The little thief sweats and tosses and fights off fevers and complains that he can see his toes over his stomach for the first time in ten seasons. Martin sleeps in the next unoccupied cot and tells him stories that start on long-ago days in their misadventures and sometimes drift into somewhere else.

“Whenever somebeast takes the anchor out of the Abbey we’ll come along. It’ll be grand, you’ll see! They’re our walls but after a dozen generations it will be nice to see the rest of the world. When the time comes I’ll give them courage and you’ll whisper a plan in their ear. They’re always good - your plans.”

“At home you’ll pass by the Dibbun beds and they’ll wake up at just the right time to sneak out of bed and find the pie cooled on the windowsill. Your songs will be remembered and reconstructed from Columbine’s journals, no one can get the tunes quite right of course but it becomes a challenge for the Abbot’s Jubilee to write their own music.”

Martin squeezes his paw until he winces.

“But not yet, you hear me you old rogue? Not yet.”

In three days Gnoff is eating for two and fiddling atop the surgery table and making patients laugh until they pull their stitches and sister Celerity, reverently, hiccupping and apologizing all the while, chases them both out with a broom.

\- - - -

"Tell Mariel ‘thank you’, won’t you? I remembered my father’s boat-hitching knot that he showed me my first summer, mother laughed at the mess I’d made of the rope. It’s all thanks to her. Her fingers plaited it into her noose after the storm. “

“Tell her I’m saving her the corner of the south ramparts closest to the bell tower. That way she can hear her father ring and see the sea.”

Columbine nodded and wrote it all down. Martin was looking at her expectantly.

"I’m sorry” she said. “I haven’t met her yet."

"You’d like her. Your little Posy-pickpocket would like her more but she best wait til’ after she finishes matters with that searat before she gets to hero-worshipping. Storm Gullwhacker has a few rough edges that only kindness can ease…” he seemed to catch himself - a gentle sheepish expression stealing over his rugged features.  
“I’m rambling on again aren’t I? You said you needed fresh honey for the blackberry crumble, let’s go down to the hives and I’ll fetch you some.”

She had said that, two mornings ago and he remembered it perfectly.

Columbine considers her notes: parchment sheet on parchment sheet of Loamhedge lore, recipes, or her husband’s song lyrics, and increasingly matters like this.

\- - -

Eventually he becomes a part the background hum of life in the Abbey, the way even a large stone in a stream eventually sinks down under the water. An old mouse in a sensible green leather jerkin with a basket of seedlings the red fire in his eyes banked low til it’s as warm and glowing as the sandstone of the walls and younger creatures ask themselves ‘did Old Martin really kill a wildcat? Did he fight and slay the wicked Tsarmina of the Thousand Eyes who was bigger than a full-grown badger and whose stare would make a creature drop dead or lose their wits? No, it can’t be. It was probably some other Martin. Maybe Old Martin’s father.’

‘How did you get that scar on your leg?’ asks a little visiting squirrelmaid, before she’s noticed and hushed up by a mortified father whispering ‘manners!, darling’

"Forgot, you know." The gardener says, grinning. There’s something heroic about that smile really, and you’d almost believe the whole thing. His fur’s nearly white with just a little brown left on his shoulders like a cloak but he’s still a big sturdy fellow from moving timber and stones for the flowerbeds. Creatures are old and rickety now who still remember the old Brother-Gardener was there when they first crossed the Abbey gates.

"Happens when you get to be my age, I forget where half my scars are from. Probably dropped the wheelbarrow on my foot.” He laughs, free and easy. “Some kind of warrior I’d be I’m so clumsy!"

You certainly couldn’t tell from the state of the garden, it’s blooming something fierce the honeysuckle vines draping companionably over the heliotrope and you’d think ‘why not a rose or two ’

"Oy, mister Martin-sir have you thought about adding some ro-” and then wiser hands pull you aside to explain.

He’s a dear old thing, sir Martin is. He waltzes the ancient widow Columbine along in all the summer dances.

\- - -

Late spring again and he shades his eyes and turns his head towards the tower, knowing, feeling the sword still there, splitting the wind around it’s winter-keen edge. He can barely see the tower roof but he sees them more clearly with each passing day: generations on generations of creatures passed and not yet born lining the seats of the Great Hall. The feast goes on, punctuated here and then by the doors swinging open to cheers and applause the tolling of the bell ringing out to signal the arrival of another old friend.

Some days a Long Patrol scout will wipe turnip-’n-tater pie off their whiskers and sing a song of olden days, great Lords and Ladies of the brother-fortress by the sea and then they get visitors. Boar and Bella will arm wrestle over the table while Sunflash cheers his mother on and Skarlath champions his friend’s grandsire out sheer fairness, twelve generations of hares whooping and laughing all around them calling out the odds.

Sometimes Abess Tansy wanders the west gallery with Abbess Germaine, the two of them giggling like girls and sometimes they float through each other in a slow shower of glittering dust that the littlest Abbeybabes watch in wonderment from their cribs until the Brother or Sister on duty comes in to check why it’s so quiet.

As he curls his old bones atop his grass pillow where they’ll find him in the morning his face is turned towards the north, towards Noonvale but he still sees it: the sweetness of life to come. A friend for every trial and two feasts for every battle.

Redwall forever, world without end.


End file.
